Julia Strachey is hardly forgotten. In 2009, Persephone Books reissued her 1932 novel Cheerful Weather for the Wedding with a cover featuring “Girl Reading,” a gorgeous painting by Harold Knight, and way back in 1978, Cheerful was reissued along with her 1951 novel The Man on the Pier (using her preferred title, An Integrated Man) as a Penguin Modern Classic.
But neither can she qualify as a major figure in English literature, even within the narrower limits of the mid-20th century. She wrote an occasional short story and some undistinguished poetry but went through years with little or no writing to show for it. So there have to be other reasons to recommend reading a book about her life. Fortunately, there are plenty. Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey is a perfect illustration of how, in the right hands, an unpromising assortment of materials — autobiographical fragments, letters written by both women, an occasional editorial note — can be combined to create a stunningly powerful book.
The first few years in India would always hold a sunny place in her memories. Her mother was devoted to her, her father tender, their servants kind, and odd creatures — snakes, frogs, birds — wandered through its spaces. There were moments of innocent comedy as little Julia began to explore her world:
One day I wandered into a vast apartment, or so it seemed to me, next door to the dining room and normally out of bounds. As I entered I beheld to my surprise, at the far end on a kind of platform, my papa, usually so elegant in his stiff white drill suit and solar topee — standing now, a new colour (a brilliant crayfish pick) in the middle of a sort of local monsoon, with torrents of water descending in needle sprays upon his head. I had never seen him in the altogether before — didn’t even take in that that was what it was, and the scene was so unexpected that I must have stood there gaping, no doubt with the door wide open into the central dining room; at any rate I heard shouts from under the waters telling me to go out again and shut the door.
In reality, however, Oliver was profoundly unhappy. His musical aspirations had to make way for a profession. A brilliant man (he worked as a cryptographer for the British Army in both world wars), he was dissatisfied with his work. And he soon discovered that Ruby’s reputation was well deserved. When she became pregnant with another man’s child, they hastily decamped from India: Ruby to the continent, Oliver with Julia to England. They divorced soon after. (Years later, encountering Ruby in France, Oliver exclaimed, “Why, Ruby, you’ve done very well. You’ve had five children by four men, haven’t you?””By five men, Oliver,” she replied, “but don’t tell George.”
Oliver deposited Julia with an elderly aunt little interested in her care, who turned her over to a very old and very deaf Scots nanny who resented the imposition. She spent much of the next few years trying to amuse herself in the large dark house on the edge of Bloomsbury:
In the silent blackness of those teardrenched hours in bed, I would hear the clip-clop, clip-clop of the horses bringing their hansom cabs along the road outside, would hear them emerging little by little from an immense distance, and (after passing our house) retreating again little by little into a further immense distance in the other direction, thus giving me an audible statement of the incalculable remoteness of the vast Unintelligible Beyond lying all around my bedroom and the house.
Then, in 1911, Oliver married Ray Costelloe, whose mother, Mary, had married the art historian Bernard Berenson. Mary Berenson was one of the three children of Richard Pearsall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith, wealthy Americans active in the Quaker movement who had moved to England in the 1880s. Mary’s brother was the writer Logan Pearsall Smith. Her sister Alys was Bertrand Russell’s first wife. Oliver and Ray had no time for Julia, so soon after their wedding they deposited her with Logan and Alys (now separated from Russell):
Beside me towered two gigantic and handsome ladies who beamed me a welcome. I saw they were no longer young but in their middle years, because of the pepper-and-salt in their hair, and also a certain rigid stoutness, and loosening of jaw-lines. But I saw also that they were as radiantly healthy, brilliantly blooming and resplendently coloured and fleshed as the summer hollyhocks standing up beside the garden door.
All these prestigious connections had little to offer in the way of consolation for a lonely little girl who understood she was an awkward addition to their household. Logan Pearsall Smith was a manic depressive, “engulfed in a lack of interest in the living world so absolute that I was shocked. Deeply shaken.” Alys (known as Aunty Loo) took primary responsibility for Julia’s care, but she had a unique approach to the task. Aunty Loo was an Edwardian example of the kind of extreme altruism that Larissa MacFarquhar studies in her book, Strangers Drowning. She had an array of charitable causes she sustained and was constantly raiding the drawers in the house for clothing to donate. She also supplied her own needs from the piles her charities amassed:
The dresses that Aunt Loo subtracted from the American mercy parcels for wearing herself would, of course, have been taken over from someone maybe half, or maybe double her size. And it was perhaps to hide the imponderables of the fit of all these frocks of varying sizes that she was in the habit of adding, on top of any frock that she had selected for herself, a number of loose tippets, ‘Berthas’, tucked capes, frilled jackets, ‘Dolmans’ and the like. It was August, and today Aunt Loo’s assorted jackets were of thin cottony stuff. On top of all, and always taking pride of place, it was her custom to slip on a white embroidered muslin affair of broderie anglaise — whose wide sleeves easily accommodated all the other sleeves crowded within.
This last item, Julia learns, had previously been Bertrand Russell’s christening robe.
Aunty Loo also approached the world with a certain severe simplicity that Julia came to understand acted as a harsh barrier underlying any of the superficial warmth of her concern for the child. “I always feel so bad — so awfully sorry — that I can never be really fond of thee,” she once confessed to Julia. “I mean that I can’t give thee the love that thee’s own mother would have given. It’s awful that I can never give thee proper affection.” This sincere, if thoughtless, confession had the emotional impact of a sledgehammer. “It was one of those moments when suddenly a chasm opens under one’s feet, an earthquake,” Julia recalled. “I saw that I was left standing on the wrong side of it, that my home, so to speak, lay crumbled away in ruins upon the further unreachable part.”
No wonder that, as Partridge put it, Julia had “a vision of herself as entangled in a web of intransigent practical circumstances created by what she liked to think of as a hostile Cosmos.” And there is plenty of evidence here and in Partridge’s diaries that Julia suffered from a form of manic depression herself. A beautiful, effervescent young woman, she was considered brilliant company. She partied, drank, traveled, had country house weekends and affairs with the Bright Young Things and the Bloomsbury set, to both of which her pedigree offered automatic membership. She tried college, gave up after one term, tried studying art, did a bit of modeling, tried her hand at writing. She took none of it too seriously.
Somewhere around mid-1926, she met Stephen Tomlin, whom Partridge recalls as “a brilliantly talented, neurotic young sculptor, who dented the hearts or minds, or both, of most people who met him.” Julia fell for him. He … well, leaned for her. There was an attraction, but he was also bisexual and involved with a number of men, among them the painter Duncan Grant (who was living with Virginia Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell).
They married in 1927. At this point, Julia takes a turn, as the autobiography that Strachey began writing in the 1960s came to an end, leaving Partridge to work with letters, diary entries (mostly her own) and a half-dozen autobiographical pieces written in the 1950s. The record of this period is fragmentary. As Partridge writes,
It is impossible to be certain when the first cracks in the marriage began to appear, but by early 1930 problems seem to have been acute. The main root of the trouble lay in Tommy’s manic-depressive character. When in a depressive bout he drank heavily, and this in turn led to uncontrolled infidelity, followed by agonising guilt. Julia reacted by finding attraction elsewhere There were two attempts to solve their difficulties by temporary separation.
By early 1934, Julia had decided to make the break permanent. She went with Frances and Ralph Partridge on a long visit to Portugal and returned to a single flat in London. She spent much of the next few years making a circuit of her friends’ houses and estates: at the Guinness (brewery) estate outside Dublin; Pakenham Hall, where she saw Anthony Powell woo his future wife, Lady Violet Pakenham; Glengariff Castle with Solly Zuckerman; and many visits to Ham Spray, the Wiltshire house that Lytton Strachey left to Ralph Partridge. Just counting up the entries in the indices of Frances Partridge’s diaries, it appears that Julia made over sixty visits to Ham Spray just between 1939 and the early 1960s.
The first time I visited Lawrence’s studio I found him crouched on all fours on the handsome red plush carpet, another present from his grandmother. Beside him were paintbrushes of every size, palettes, cans oflinseed oil and tubes of paint. A half-finished canvas was laid out on the floor in front of his knees. One could see he was short-sighted by the way he seemed to be putting the colours on the canvas with the end of his long finely-pointed nose, instead of with his brushes. I at once saw that his absorption in his work was total. He was lost to the world. It was a sight I was never to forget.
They soon began living together. Though they discussed marriage, it was Julia who demurred. By the time they did marry, in 1952, their relationship was already something of an odd compromise. Lawrence took a post with an art college in Newcastle. Julia could only bear the dreariness of Newcastle for a few months at a time. He was attracted to some of his students. She increasingly worried about her age, her place as a writer, her place as a woman. And she was increasingly suffering what we can see as clear signs of depression or perhaps bi-polar disease. In Partridge’s view, her situation is captured by these lines from An Integrated Man: “She seemed to be shrieking to be released. He was looking at an animal in a trap, crying out to be saved.”
Despite Lawrence’s roving eye, they found a certain comfort in each other’s company. Julia got a job she enjoyed, working as a reader in a publishing house and they took a country cottage a half hour or so from Ham Spray. She published several pieces, including a story titled “Can’t You Get Me Out of Here,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 1960.
I won’t attempt to summarize this piece, more essay than story, but it’s unlike anything that would have appeared in the magazine at that time — free-wheeling, absurd, imaginative, comic, yet packing a devastating emotional force. Strachey takes a bizarre incident from one of her trips to Italy, in which a tree frog leapt from an arbor into a tureen of spaghetti sauce sitting on her table, was fished out with a ladle, and then hopped off, disoriented, into the nearby bushes. “I am a tree frog myself,” she writes:
And I can confirm that it is indeed a brash curiosity about queer-looking-things-far-glimpsed that starts a tree frog’s nervous speckled legs to twitch. I know it all –the lunatic leap out from the scaffolding into space, the brief whiz through colored airs, then the landing down in the dark, among yielding, treacherous, slithering things…..
But for me it is the spectacle of the very Distances themselves, Long Distances (not negligible Distances), that intoxicates. Or to put it another way, the spectacle of Differences that acts like strong drink and causes the green-speckled legs to twitch.
Later in the piece, she and Lawrence, back in England, have to take Popsy, a friend’s dog, to a kennel for a short stay. Having had the run of a farm, cavorting among the cattle as Julia took her for a last walk, Popsy reacts in shock and panic when the gate of the kennel pen is shut in her face:
At any rate her old, familiar, beautiful life was over. She had been deserted by the ones she loved; she had been betrayed into the hands of these strangers, to live out the rest of her days in this rotten few inches of earth. That’s anyway, how it was to her.
As for me, I felt, as I lay in bed that night, as if a meat axe had been thrown into my soul and was sticking there, undislodgeable. In no time I was out of the scaffolding and down in the darkness inside the old spaghetti tureen.
One cannot miss the parallels between Julia’s abandonment by her parents and Popsy’s being left at the kennel.
In 1964, not long after the death of Frances’ only son, they travel together to Rome. Frances is always alert for Julia suddenly veering off course, concerned that neither her prescription drugs nor the Italian wine are helping. In her diary entries, Frances is constantly switching between friend and caretaker: enjoying her company, ushering her out of awkward situations. A year later, after a dinner together, Frances writes with relief, “She is, after all, the person with whom I am most at ease, the oldest of my friends.” By 1970, Frances is noting that Julia “is coherent one moment, muddled the next.” Their friendship strains, breaks. Julia “flounced out of my flat banging the door and saying we are constitutionally unfit to get along with each other.” Two years without contact follow, until Frances extends an olive branch and invites Julia to dinner again. Their friendship resumes.
By early 1974, however, the reprise is at an end. “Julia has suddenly lurched into old age and it’s a distressing spectacle,” Frances writes. In July, after a phone call full of “inspissated gloom,” she cries out to her diary: “Oh Julia, Julia, Julia, Julia!” Over the next months, more pleas for help, followed by recriminations and accusations. In December, another call: “I wonder if you’d have a moment. I’ve been feeling suicidal. The doctor doesn’t send my pills and my sink’s full of dirty washing up and I have no food in the house.” Frances rebels — if only to herself: “F (silently): No. No. No.”
A year or so later, suffering from the flu and losing energy, Julia writes in a last diary fragment, “My fear is that I shall lose the only interest I still have in staying alive — namely the desire to get some of my past life materialised in my writing. But my memories — even the most vital and precious — seem to be fading also, like the daylight.” To which Frances adds, “To further this aim of Julia’s, and at the same time show her quality as a writer and a human being, has been the purpose of this book.”
Julia Strachey died in 1979. Frances Partridge died in 2004, just short of the age of 104, having published the last volume of her diaries three years before. It seems unlikely that another book like Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey will ever be published. Julia and Frances knew each other for seventy years, at their best and worst of times and had the capacity to write about their experiences with honesty, intelligence, and more than a little humor. Frances loved Julia but struggled to tolerate, let alone understand, the effects of her mental illness. Would any of us do better? Neither woman will ever rank among the major figures of their time. Yet in this book they managed to create one of the finest English autobiographies. It’s been reissued several times by Penguin, most recently by Phoenix in 2001. It richly deserves to be brought back again — and this time, for good.
This is entirely extraneous to the rest of your post, but I read an essay in Morley’s Modern Essays by Logan Pearsall Smith and he had one of the most striking styles of any writer in the whole collection.
https://www.bartleby.com/237/29.html
Thank you for this. It goes to prove Henry James’s point about what a careful and imaginative writer can do even with the scarcest of materials.